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Chapter 15: Truth Said, Truth Dead

One of my professors, S.S. Roy, who is still alive, loved me so much that he used to tell me, “I am always worried about you. I know whatsoever you do, you do with sincerity, but in this world sincerity does not pay. Authenticity is not respected. Rebellion is crushed. And the people who are in power are powerful enough to crush any individual, because the whole society - the courts, the law, the government, everything - is in their hands. You are powerless.”

I told him, “I know that they have a certain power but please don’t say that I am powerless. I also have a certain power, not of the same category but of a higher category. They can kill me but they cannot kill my truth. And my truth is more important to me than my life, because my life is going to end anyway. If it ends in the service of truth then it will have a certain eternity about it, because truth cannot be killed. You can crucify a Jesus, but how can you crucify this man’s truth? If he had any truth, that truth is going to live. You can poison Socrates..”

I told Professor S.S. Roy, “I love you just like my father, and I know how much you love me and how much you respect me, which is very unexpected - that a professor, well respected all over the country, should be respecting a student - but I cannot accept your advice. You are giving it with all good wishes - I am grateful for that. But let me be crucified, let me be poisoned, let every power be against me; yet I say to you that my experience makes me much more powerful than all those people. Their power is just temporary: the power that truth gives you is eternal.”

He said to me, “I understand, still I cannot help being concerned about you. I have nightmares about you - that somebody will shoot you, somebody will crucify you, somebody will poison you.” And all these efforts have been made; he was perfectly right. Whenever an attempt on my life was made, I had always informed him, “One of your nightmares has come true. But I have survived it, so don’t be worried. Your other nightmares also I will survive.”

To have the spirit of rebellion, all that you need is guts; and you have them. You have simply forgotten about them. Every individual is born with tremendous courage. Nature is not partial in that it gives courage to Alexander the Great and does not give you courage; it is not so. As far as nature is concerned it is absolutely communist. Communists are not communists, but existence is absolutely communist. It has no categories: it does not make courageous people and cowardly people. No, it simply creates courageous people. Cowardliness is created by those who want to remain in power forever. They create the cowards, because only the cowards will not rebel.

And it is very easy: they have found, in thousands of years, all the tactics. They have become immensely crafty. They have found every possible way to weaken you, to destroy the very idea of being a rebel. To make you a coward they have created a hell - which exists nowhere. But from the very childhood you are programmed that if you do certain things you will suffer in hell. And sometimes it is so illogical.